"This year is the first time that we are able to cover the cost of the PlayStation 3," Yoshida said. "We aren't making huge money from hardware, but we aren't bleeding like we used to."

In the interim, as game development for the platform initially lagged, they lost a lot of ground on the "hardcore gamer" front to Microsoft, and got surprised on the other end by Nintendo. They run the risk of slipping again - it looks like MS will have Kinect (their answer to the Wii) out at the same time that Sony will have their version (and Sony's version looks, well, strange).

The lawsuit was filed by Ward & Ward, PLLC and Charles A. Gilman, LLC. on behalf of Kevin McCaffrey, Linda Wrinn and a number of other iPhone 4 users. It is not the same iPhone 4 class action lawsuit currently said to be in the works by the California law firm that sued Facebook and Zynga.

I can't say I've run across this problem myself. It's been reported too widely to not be real, but it doesn't seem all that serious to me.

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at replicating packages and bundles between store source code repositories. There's a UI for one off replication; the screencast shows you how to use the engine directly. To create replication rules, you do something like this (the repository names are the logical ones from your connection list):

So Facebook updated their iPhone app to take advantage of fast app switching in iOS4. That's great for the iPhone, but - where the heck is my iPad scaled app? For a company the size of Facebook, can't they handle that?

When it became clear that the iPad wouldn't be supporting Flash, and that it was likely a device many of our customers were going to view reports on, we had all the motivation we needed to overhaul our charts to work around the problems mentioned above. At the same time, JavaScript based charts that take advantage of standards like canvas and SVG had come a long way and would likely make the transition a much simpler process.

I expect this trend to continue. With Hulu coming out for the iPad and iPhone, even the streaming sites don't need Flash anymore...

This information comes from a new tipster, but we have very good reason to believe that Verizon will begin rolling out its LTE network in 25 markets starting on November 15th. While 25 markets might not sound like a lot, but apparently they’re enough to give 100 million subscribers access to the next-generation wireless network.

I'm no wireless expert, but I seem to recall that LTE merges Verizon's network with the next gen global wireless standard - which would make their network a lot more suitable for the iPhone as far as Apple is concerned. Just as the existing phone has the 2g (Edge) and 3g (GSM) radios, a Verizon edition could have a 3g (CDMA) and 4g (LTE) radio. Does that make sense? I guess we'll find out.

Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile-phone company, will start selling Apple Inc.'s iPhone next year, ending AT&T Inc.'s exclusive hold on the smartphone in the U.S., two people familiar with the plans said.

How solid a rumor? Well...

The device will be available to customers in January, according to the people, who declined to be named because the information isn't public.

Right... It would still involve a downgrade so far as Apple is concerned (the whole voice/data problem on CDMA issue), and LTE is still on the horizon. So I'll believe it when I see it :)

If I could just stream episodes, and not have to worry about getting the (truly awful) Comcast DVR to work, I might move off cable completely. Hulu is trying to give me that option, with a monthly subscription plan:

In a first for Hulu, the shows will be accessible to subscribers on the iPhone, the iPad, and on some television sets. Soon it will also work through the PlayStation3 and Xbox video game consoles.

Between this, video games, and Netflix, I think we might be at a real inflection point for TV service. Like POTS phones, cable TV use has peaked, and will start to move downward.

Last night Michael pointed me to this article on something called "Entity Based Programming" - an approach that the author claims is better than OOP for MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). I read it with interest - the first three sections sounded interesting, and made some good points. Part four started to lose me though, as he veered into relational technology as the answer - by part five, I was completely off board. In a discussion of metadata, he had this to say about metadata for game objects:

You can’t do that with OOP: you can get some *similar* benefits by doing C-Header-File Voodoo, and writing lots of proprietary code … but … so much is dependent upon your header files that unless you really know what you’re doing you probably shouldn’t go there

This tells me that everything he knows about OOP comes from C and C++, which doesn't give me confidence in where he's coming from. It's the rest of part five that had me losing interest - his near obeisance to relational technology as a way to proceed. Apparently, he hasn't noticed that the large scale web apps - Twitter, Facebook, Digg - have all been bailing on relational technology, because it doesn't scale for their needs.

Based on what this guy writes - the need for speed - in MMOG systems, I simply cannot see relational as a scalable response. That's too bad, because the first three parts of his article were interesting. I'm not sure I'm sold on what he's pushing, but I was intrigued. Parts four and five? Totally lost me.

Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for people who "recently purchased the new iPhone and have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls and weak signals." That's the same firm that filed a federal class action suit over deceptive "offer" ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville.

The "beneficiaries" in these sorts of cases get little or nothing; the lawyers, on the other hand, pocket millions for "helping" the rest of us. The worst part is that their "help" usually results in higher prices. All firms like this do is subtract value - everywhere they go, things get worse.

It may seem that Steve Jobs is on a lonely crusade against Adobe’s Flash format with the rest of the industry simply waiting who this battle will turn out. While Adobe is rallying support for Flash, Apple receives support from a rather unexpected ally, the adult film industry. The founder of Digital Playground, one of the porn heavyweights in the U.S., told ConceivablyTech that it will abandon Flash as soon as the desktop browsers fully support HTML 5.

Ok, I have a Windows 7 VM setup - it's using my wifi adaptor (this is parallels) for network, so that it can appear to be a "separate machine". I also have shared setup for things like the Documents folder. So... I found this odd. I couldn't get a Seaside server to start, and it boiled down to this - executing the following:

IPSocketAddress hostNameByAddress: #[127 0 0 1]

Comes back with - wait for it - '.psf'. I'm baffled; the call goes straight to the VM for some host API call. I suppose maybe I should configure a different sort of VM, but how much time do I want to spend on that? It was simpler to hack class IPSocketAddress and save the image to a new name. I'd still like to know what the heck is going on though...

This week's podcast features something new - a review of a number of packages in the public store repository. We intend to make this subject a recurring feature of the podcast; we'll be talking about things in various Squeak/Pharo repositories over time as well. This week, we covered:

NameGenerator

Herl

SubFork

MustBeBoolean

ImageLocker

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

Alyssa Thomas, 6, is a little girl who is already under the spotlight of the federal government. Her family recently discovered that Alyssa is on the "no fly" list maintained by U.S. Homeland Security.

Like a lot of current issues - things I see my daughter run into at school, the response to the oil spill, and so on - this is the elevation of rules and process over personal judgment. As a society, we have decided that "the rules" are all that matters, even when they result in really stupid things.

The STIC Board has decided to organize Smalltalk Solutions 2011 in Las Vegas from Sunday March 13 to Wednesday March 16, 2011. This time, one of our goals is to attract strangers, i.e. non-Smalltalks to our conference. Thus we are looking for an attractive sub title. Buzz words which popped into our minds are Cloud and Dynamic Languages. Thus we start a call for subtitle today. Please send your idea(s) to georg@stic.st until July 31st, 2010. The STIC Board of Directores shall vote on the subtitle. We sill also run a drawing amoung all submissions to win three prices: 10%, 5%, and 3% discount off the admission fee.

There will likely be a call for participation soon - in the meantime, if you have a suggestion for a subtitle, let Georg know.

I think there's something of a quiet revolution going on in retail - I say "quiet" because it goes beyond the typical desire to save sales tax involved in, say, an Amazon purchase.

This morning I had a grocery delivery arrive - unattended, on my front porch, with the perishable foods packed in cold packs. Last week, my iPhone and iPad arrived at my door - and while I was home to get those, I had printed out a "leave them on the porch" form in case I had to go out. I rarely go to places like Best Buy any longer; why would I? I can get hard drives and printer ink (the two most common things I end up needing) delivered to my door for a lot less than they charge, and with a lot more choice in ordering as well.

I might be something of an outlier for my age group, but this kind of thing is on the rise. It's just way, way simpler to order stuff. No driving, no hassles with parking - and it's going to drive a lot more change than the blathering you hear about suburbs vs. urban, or about driving vs. mass transit. Add in the fact that a lot more work can be done remotely, and you have a sea change in how people deal with things. To get the kind of services I enjoy:

Fast internet

Inexpensive delivery of goods

You need to live in an area that's dense enough for, say, broadband to pay for itself, but you don't need to live in a city. It's not that you shouldn't live in a city - whatever floats your boat. It's just that the number of trips required for goods are going to plummet out here in the burbs. You'll still have to drive for other things - kids activities come to mind - but a lot of the rest of it will be fading. I suspect that the big box stores have peaked, and will be finding their prospects leveling out - and even dropping - as this dynamic plays out.

According to a report from the UK's Glass Guide, unless manufacturers properly address customer concerns regarding battery life and performance, the new breed of electric vehicles (EV) soon to be launched will have residual values well below those of rival gasoline and diesel models, with a typical electric vehicle retaining only 10% of its value after five years of ownership, compared to gas and diesel-fueled counterparts retaining 25% of their value in that time period

I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense. Consider your laptop - my Macbook Pro is now 3 years old. It doesn't hold battery power anything like it did when it first arrived; likewise, my new iPhone retains a charge much better than the 2008 era one it replaced. With small electronic devices, that's an annoyance - power is not typically far away.

For a car though? Recharging takes a lot of time, and if your range drops significantly over the course of 3 years, that's going to be a problem. Even for someone like me, who typically fills the tank once a month, that's an issue.

I'm pretty confidant that some ideas are better suited for tweets and others for blog postss, but the line can be fuzzy. And the temptation of laziness persists so I'm going to need to increase the temptation of effort to counter it. In the meantime, I'll be on Twitter throwing out undeveloped thoughts with everyone else.

I found that interesting, because i used to write a lot more long pieces - if you go back to my early archives on my Cincom blog, you'll find plenty of them. Over time, I've gotten to be much more of a "slap it out there" blogger.

I'm not sure why that happened, and i couldn't point to a when - it just sort of happened. I've also come to a different way of dealing with Twitter - I mostly don't post to it directly. Instead, I write here, my server auto-tweets what I post, and a Facebook app picks up my tweets and tosses them into my news feeds. I'll sometimes toss out a tweet directly from my iPhone; very rarely from my Mac.

Again, I'm not really sure why things evolved for me this way; they just did.

I saw this on my Facebook news feed, from a happy user of VisualWorks:

From my perspective, Smalltalk (in the form of VisualWorks) is the perfect vehicle for exploratory programming. The latest incarnation of my program tests competing theories and allows me to make choices of what to use, based on recent history.

That's how I've always seen VW. I usually start out with a few lines of script in a workspace, migrate to a class or two, and build up from there. The immediate feedback is what sets Smalltalk apart.

I finished Alan Wake this evening - it's an interesting game. It's linear, but it held my interest more than shooters like "Modern Warfare" - it's more of a story with a game attached. The game elements themselves are challenging - the end battle, for instance, took me a few tries to get right. Let me just say this, to avoid too many spoilers: it's hard to beat a supernatural weather event with a flare gun and a flashlight :)

I only got 30 of the 50 achievement points - I'm not sure I'd try it on "Nightmare", but it might be worth running through again in search of the rest of the manuscript. Reading those pages to get a taste of what was coming next was one of the best parts of the game. If you like horror, I think you'll like this gane.

For $10 a month, viewers will reportedly have access to a wider selection of shows than the free, ad-supported version Hulu currently offers. The service would work on PCs and specialized devices such as the iPad, videogame consoles and set-top boxes. The company plans to test a version of this “Hulu Plus” subscription, an expected development, with select users as early as this month to find out whether they’ll will bite, according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal and All Things Digital.

What Cuban doesn't quite get is the difference between an on demand model, where I as a consumer get to decide how much to pay, and the "all you can eat" model the cable company wants me to pay for. He's a billionaire; he doesn't even notice. The rest of us do.

Last week, the city's board of supervisors voted 10-1 to require cellphone retailers to show how much radiation their phones emit. Mayor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign it, making it the first such law in the nation.

At some point, we'll all be so safe that we won't be able to do anything but quietly starve in a padded room...

FedEx delivered the iPad and iPhone this morning; I got them both set up pretty quickly. The iPhone is nice, but the square-ish shape is kind of weird for an Apple product. My only complaint so far is this - in my pocket, I can't tell the back from the front. It's a minor quibble and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I haven't tried a lot of things out yet - one thing I need to start using is voice commands with my headset.

The iPad is really nice - my daughter has already been using it to look things up for video games. It seems trivial, but it's nice to have a small device right there that's easy to read. I downloaded a free ebook a long time ago for my iPhone, but never really got anywhere with it. I went back to it on the iPad, and the reading experience on it seems very nice. I expect to shift a lot of my book purchases over to it.

My only complaint has nothing to do with the iPad - more of a "huh, what?" kind of thing. Facebook has no native iPad app yet? Seriously?

I just finished reading Sramana Mitra's Entrepreneur Journeys v.4 : Innovation: Need Of the Hour (Volume 4)
- a set of interviews/case studies with various people who have built businesses from the ground up. Some with venture capital, some without, some in manufacturing, and some in software. The software examples resonated better with me, simply because it's a field I live in; I did like many of the examples from the "harder" sectors though.

I especially liked Paul Cook's Raychem story - he was pretty adamant about the need to pay attention to customers/prospects, and about getting to profitability fast. It's a lesson a lot of software outfits could learn from; I think a lot of the VC money that's been burned in the industry has been a net negative. Mitra makes that point later in the book, when she covered CollabNet, SpringSource, and SugarCRM - all outfits that started from nothing, and bootstrapped themselves into big things.

In general, I liked her call for more rational behavior on the part of government, VC's, and academia - I just wish she hadn't then been so rah rah about the Xunlight thing, a company that's lived exclusively off government grants. I'm not sure I'd call that a success. I also wish she had gone a bit into the problems in the IPO space being caused by SarbOx - that's an example of well intentioned government action that has had the unintended consequence of hindering IPOs.

Overall, I liked the book though. It was fun to read the various stories. Having worked at ParcPlace in the latter part of its startup journey, it was nice to read about firms and people who had not made the same mistakes.

I've been mentioning the next release of BottomFeeder for awhile; you might be wondering where it is. The current build is based on VW 7.6, and 7.7 has been out for awhile - but 7.7.1 is coming out this summer. So rather than release it on a soon to be passed release of VW, I've decided to hold back. When 7.7.1 ships, I'll ship Bf. Other than one issue I'm tracking, things are ready for release.